


What's love got to do with it

by grapehyasynth



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, UST, framework fic, happy though? somehow?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-21
Updated: 2017-03-21
Packaged: 2018-10-08 23:23:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10398465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grapehyasynth/pseuds/grapehyasynth
Summary: Theirs has never been a fiery, instant love, the see-it-gotta-have-it kind of attraction. Even Fitz has admitted that while he’d long harbored a crush for her, it hadn’t started until they’d been friends for some time.But this?Jemma is fairly sure that even if she didn’t already know how it feels when Fitz brings her to toe-curling orgasm or what his scratchy morning voice sounds like calling to her from the shower or that secretive little smile of appraisal he reserves just for her, she’d still be drawn to this man.And more alarmingly, with the way he’s looking at her – and not looking away – it’s clear that he feels the same, without the years of mutual respect and affection and recent accumulation of physical intimacy to justify the actual smolder he directs her way.--Framework-Fitz walks into Framework-Jemma's diner... And the connection is undeniable. But is lusting for your almost-but-not-really boyfriend infidelity? Inspired by the truly luminous and distracting picture of Framework Fitz.--





	

Jemma could almost get used to this. It’s a Thursday night, the diner has hit its after-dinner lull, and with the steady thunderstorm outside and the jukebox murmuring from the corner, it all feels rather cozy.

She leans back against the counter, slipping her pad of paper into the pocket on her apron. It’s not a life she’d ever envisioned for herself. And it’s _certainly_ not what she’d anticipated when she and Daisy had plunged into the Framework that held their friends ensnared.

But it’s… simple. Uncomplicated. Safe.

If a little lonely.

Headlights sweep across the front windows, refracted somewhat by the rain, and she breathes in, turns away, pushing down the sensation – somewhere at the cross-section of cold, emptiness, and suffocation; she hasn’t quite pinned it down – that fills her lungs when she lets herself think too much.

By the time the bells over the door give their homey chime, she’s got her smile back in place (“pleasant, but not too eager – you look like a sociopath,” her manager had informed her after her first shift).

But it slips away the instant she sees who’s just come in.

The very person for whom she dove into this hellhole.

The very reason she’s been subsisting on a diet of cheesy fries and carrot cake.

And whatever she’s been preparing herself for, it wasn’t this.

Her one coherent thought?

_Fuck._

Steam rises from Fitz’s body as he stops on the carpet just inside the door. Water falls almost in slow-motion from his slicked hair as he brushes rain off the shoulders of his finely-fitted pea coat, below which she can see perfectly pressed suit trousers and black dress shoes which catch the water like so many jewels, like something so mundane as moisture can’t possibly disrupt their ineffable shine. A burgundy tie peeks above his coat collar, and Jemma’s gaze tracks up from there along his neck, to the scruff – no, almost a beard now, thicker than she’d remembered – his strikingly pink lips set in an unfamiliarly severe line, his eyes dark, closed-off, and looking right at her.

Theirs has never been a fiery, instant love, the see-it-gotta-have-it kind of attraction. Even Fitz has admitted that while he’d long harbored a crush for her, it hadn’t started until they’d been friends for some time.

But this?

Jemma is fairly sure that even if she didn’t already know how it feels when Fitz brings her to toe-curling orgasm or what his scratchy morning voice sounds like calling to her from the shower or that secretive little smile of appraisal he reserves just for her, she’d still be drawn to this man.

And more alarmingly, with the way he’s looking at her – and not looking away – it’s clear that he feels the same, without the years of mutual respect and affection and recent accumulation of physical intimacy to justify the actual _smolder_ he directs her way.

A terrified, needy, gasping breath escapes her, and the spell is broken. Fitz glances away, slipping off leather gloves and moving to a booth as two burly men – Friends? Guards? Handlers? – follow him closely.

“Oooh, hot playboy alert, and he’s in _my_ section!” trills Alexei, dancing past Jemma.

She catches him by the apron-strings and reels him back. “Lex – let me. Please? So I don’t go home and cry into my wine?” Jemma wheedles. She’s laying it on a bit thick, but Alexei is nothing if not a supportive friend and wingman.

He gives her an appraising look, glances back at Fitz, then smiles and pats her hand. “Go get him.”

She could easily have let Alexei take the order. She could’ve slipped into the kitchen, eaten her fill of onion rings and complained to Shawna about how depressing the decline of good journalism was. (Somehow fixing people’s regrets hadn’t solved _that_ disaster.)

But she’s a bloody agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., damn it, and AIDA has intervened in her relationship with the person she considers home – and she’s going to enforce and logistic the shit out of the situation. Or something.

“Good evening, gentleman,” she says breezily, carefully positioning herself on the far side of Fitz’s booth so she can look at him – finally, finally see that face again – without standing so close to him she loses her mind. “I’ll be your server this evening. My name is Jemma. Can I get you some beverages to begin?”

“Not from around here, are you?” Fitz notes, not answering her, toying with his menu but not looking at it.

“Neither are you,” she shoots back, before she can help it.

“And how would you know that?”

The men with him have their hands under the table, _they could be concealing bloody firearms for all I know_. “I’m an anthropologist. Amateur anthropologist,” she amends, gesturing to her waitress uniform. “If your accent weren’t a clear giveaway, the fact that Sue didn’t greet you when you entered indicates that you have never before entered this fine establishment.” She jerks her chin at the old lady who sits on the bar stool all the way at the end of the counter.

“Pretty and smart,” Fitz murmurs. Jemma doesn’t roll her eyes, but she has to grit her teeth so that her smile becomes painful. “No drinks. I’m hungry. What do you recommend?”

“Well, that depends.”

“On? Money’s not an option.”

“Yes, I gathered,” she replies drily. “On your lifestyle choices. We have the healthy options, the faux-healthy options, and the ‘I love myself and want to die fat, young, and happy’ options.”

Fitz purses his lips slightly and squints, an expression not unlike how he looks when he’s considering a formula with which she’s presented him in the lab. “We’ll need a minute.”

She scurries back behind the counter and hides there, blushing from head to toe and torn between throwing herself at him and running out the back door. After a full five minutes, longer than service guidelines would consider acceptable, she glides back over.

“See anything you like?”

Fitz closes the menu but doesn’t look up, so his gaze falls somewhere around Jemma’s waist. He raises his eyes slowly, along the buttons of her shirt, and when he finally meets her gaze he’s smiling slightly.

“I do.”

“Well, alright then,” she chokes out, flipping open her notepad. This is _not_ how flirting with Fitz normally works. “What’ll you have?”

“You.”

This is fantasy. This is a bloody fantasy novel, or another freaking sex dream, and she’s got to stop having these because—

“I’m sorry, sir, I don’t think I underst—“

“Oh, you understand,” almost-Fitz murmurs. “I thought I was hungry, but it turns out it was a different kind of… appetite I was looking to fill.”

Clearing her throat, Jemma glances over to where Alexei is watching, rapt. “This is a family restaurant, sir. If I am not misconstruing your meaning, I would kindly direct you to the eastern part of the city, where you’ll find—“

“I don’t want some random girl in some dark club,” he cuts her off, waving a hand. It’s imperious, a gesture of a man used to controlling a room. “Not tonight. I want you.”

Jemma is running quick calculations in her head, how long Daisy would need to get to her at some future location, the potential risk of insinuating herself in Fitz’s life before the extraction she and Daisy have planned, the benefits of spying.

The infidelity of lusting for a man who is almost your boyfriend but not quite.

“Why me?”

Fitz chuckles, just once, spreading an arm across the back of the booth. “That’s a good question, Jemma. For the life of me I can’t _quite_ figure out what it is. You’re beautiful, of course, no question. But there are thousands of beautiful women in this city. But you—” He tilts his head at her, and she wants to scream at him to lose the arrogance, to blink a bit and break her gaze and stop studying her without a trace of self-consciousness. It’s not _right._ “You’re captivating. I feel like we were meant to meet.”

Behind her back, Jemma presses the tip of the pencil into her palm to keep herself from pantomiming vomiting. Romantic, yes, but _cliché?_ Real Fitz would be so ashamed.

 “What do you propose?” she hedges.

“Come with me. I have a hotel room—“ _Of course you do. “_ We can go there, have dinner at our leisure. Privately. Maybe…” He draws a finger along the unused fork, watching her coyly. “Maybe even dessert.”

“Okay.” It slips out unintended. Partially she wants to shut his fucking arrogant face up, partially she sees this as a chance to advance their schemes, partially she’s tired of being lonely and she misses Fitz and if this is the closest she can come – she doesn’t need to sleep with him, of course – though this almost-Fitz is undeniably hot and it’s still technically Fitz, just a part of his brain, and would it be so bad to— “I’ll get my coat.”

 

 

 

 

When Fitz had said hotel, Jemma had assumed he meant motel, as he clearly intended a seedy hook-up, but his chauffeur brings them instead to a skyscraper of residential apartments. The guards hang back as Fitz guides Jemma into a life with a hand on her lower back. The elevator lets them out on the fortieth floor, not quite at the top but close, and there’s no hallway – the entire floor is Fitz’s hotel room.

“Bloody hell,” Jemma whispers, taking in the plush white carpet and dark wood and massive white couches.

“Nice, isn’t it?” Fitz asks lazily, sounding almost bored. He’s found wine somewhere, and he pours her a glass, which she drinks in one swallow and holds out for more. The corner of his mouth ticks up but he acquiesces without comment.

With her second glass, she wanders to the window. She wonders what it’s like to wake up in a place like this, to live a life without concern for money or mission or impending global doom. She rolls her neck slightly as the first buzz of the alcohol hits her. At least he doesn’t have a breakfast nook.

The lights dim slightly; soft music, something deep and rolling and irrepressibly seductive, begins to play from unseen speakers. She watches Fitz approach in the reflection in the window, watches him finish his glass and set it on a side table. There’s a desperate want low in her stomach and an echoing fear high in her chest. She’s never been wooed, never been courted – well, Fitz had tried, with that beautiful dinner with the roses and the wine and the – but time hadn’t been on their side. And it had worked out anyway, hadn’t it? They had had their own unique courting process that she thinks of as equally lovely, infinitely more precious—

He stops behind her, not quite touching her, but so close it’s almost worse than if he’d pressed himself against her. He exhales once, his warm breath fluttering the hairs that’ve come loose from her ponytail and hang along her neck.

“Magnificent view,” he whispers huskily. “Best in the city.”

She can’t see it, too fixated on his reflection, on the way he’s leaning just over her shoulder, his face turned towards hers, his nose almost brushing her ear.

“Yes,” she breathes. Her mind is foggy with him. That always happens with Fitz, of course, but—

She drops her again-empty glass, its fall muffled in the carpet, and she twists to him, falls into him, kissing him desperately—

They stumble to the couch. _God_ , he’s good at kissing. Who has he been kissing in this Jemma-less world? She tries to run her hands through his hair but it’s not quite right, a little stiff with product, so she settles for the painful pleasure of the scratch of his beard, slightly familiar. She falls on top of him, mouths at his neck, ignores the strange sensation of cufflinks pressing into her back as he holds her to him. She needs this, she needs him—

He’s wearing a bloody three-piece suit. It had been hot five minutes ago, when he was standing there all playboy millionaire, all there’s-a-cologne-named-after-me, all ironed and pressed, but now she understands why her Fitz never wears these stupid things – so many layers between them, so many damn buttons when she just wants him, she just wants Fitz—

She pulls away from him so forcefully that her momentum carries her to the far end of the couch. He pulls his feet away so she’s not sitting on his shoes – _probably more concerned for the damn things than for my comfort_ – and blinks at her, in his bleary confusion the most Fitz-like he’s been.

But he’s not Fitz. And she can try to get drunk on wine and on the sensory, sensual power of this man and this place but it’s not _Fitz_.

“This is wrong,” she sighs.

“So wrong it’s right?” he suggests hopefully.

She laughs, genuinely, and crosses her arms over her chest, feeling exposed in a way she’s never felt with Fitz. “That’s the most normal thing you’ve said all night,” she chuckles, knowing he won’t understand.

“We could, um, have something to eat first? If you’d like?”

“No, it’s not— It’s not a matter of atmosphere, or convention, or foreplay. It’s – there’s someone else,” she explains, wincing to herself at the half-truth of it. “Someone I love very much.”

“What’s love got to do with it?”

And this is how she knows, she realizes with an incongruous smile that is only the outward expression of a warmth that tingles from her extremities into her chest. Fitz _is_ a romantic, sometimes so much she feels insufficient in comparison. But he likes to make her feel unique and he values things like commitment and monogamy and physical intimacy is important and precious and fragile to him. And he could be as hot as this iteration or as much of a wallflower as the boy she’d first met – but unless all that ridiculous, sappy, positively charming devotion is contained within, she’ll not want him.

She wants _Fitz._

He walks her to the elevator, looking slightly chagrined, but also like he’ll bounce back and find someone else, probably within the night. (The thought only brings her a _slight_ twinge of jealousy, though she has to studiously banish the mental images which arise.)

“I can’t shake a feeling like we’re meant to be in each other’s lives,” he says one more time.

It’s a line, one he’s probably used before, but Jemma smiles softly.

“We’ll meet again, Fitz. I’m sure of it.”

The doors have almost closed between them when he catches them with his hand.

“You’ll be careful?”

She blanches. “What?”

“The city. It’s not always safe at night. Take a cab, or ask my chauffeur to take you where you need to go. Just – be careful, Jemma.”

She lets herself cry in the elevator. After all, it’s forty floors – what else is she supposed to do?

 

 

 

When she recounts it all to Daisy the next day, her friend frowns at her, that little squish to her face that indicates she finds Jemma entirely indecipherable at the moment.

“Why are you smiling? It sounds like the date from hell.”

“I’m relieved,” Jemma admits. “If I’d wanted that Fitz as much as I want my Fitz, it’d be all sorts of confusing – do I not think he’s hot enough? Do I want him to be something other than what he is? Will I grow bored with him in five, ten, fifteen years and look for someone else? I _thought_ that’s what was happening. Even as I was afraid of it I was letting it happen. And then I realized I _didn’t_ want it. I love Fitz, Daisy,” she finishes dazedly.

“Yeah, no shit,” Daisy snorts.

“No, but – _love_ him, love him. In an endless, timeless, irrevocable way. The type of love that isn’t shattered by arguments but grows to accommodate them and learn from them. The type of love that’s as much from idiosyncrasies and small details as it is from the grand declarations. I – I always suspected, but I – I feel like I’ve passed some sort of test I set for myself. And I’m so, _so_ relieved.”

“You feel like you’ve finally earned Fitz!” Daisy gasped accusingly. “All that BS you’ve given me about ‘it’s not tit-for-tat, just because he’s saved me a million times doesn’t mean—‘”

“I do _not_ sound like that. And I believe all that, I do, but – I confess, I was always afraid I was somehow not worthy of Fitz. That his love was transcendent and mine was fundamentally mortal. But I love him,” she repeats. “I love him more than a super-hot, super-rich, super-seductive version of him.”

Daisy watches her for a long time, then snorts again and wraps Jemma in a big, sideways hug. “You guys are getting hitched the second we hit reality, even if I have to do it myself.”

 

 

 

 


End file.
